There has been some research conducted around the motivation for the use of Twitter and the value brought by micro-blogging tools to individuals and business environments. This paper builds on our understanding of how the phenomenon affects the population which birthed the technology: Software Engineers. We find that the Software Engineering community extensively leverages Twitter's capabilities for conversation and information sharing and that use of the tool is notably different between distinct Software Engineering groups. Our work exposes topics for future research and outlines some of the challenges in exploring this type of data.

"From this site, we selected the top 30 individuals for the topics Linux and Eclipse. We chose these two topics based on their potential to expose "tweeters" from a large operating system community as well as an IDE development community. We also decided to investigate a project for which all committers use Twitter. Through a colleague, we were informed that the MXUnit project lists the Twitter user names for all eight of its committers. The MXUnit project [5] is a small, open source ColdFusion test framework that is written as an Eclipse plug-in."

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